The Alto Trombone in the Orchestra: 1800-2000

Extracted from the published edition
(Originally PhD thesis, Oxford University, May 2000)

by Ken Shifrin, Former Principal Trombonist, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra

Dedicated to my mentor and friend Professor Jarmil Burghauser, 1921-1997

Acknowledgements

This thesis would not have been possible without the assistance and encouragement of many individuals to whom a debt of gratitude is owed. While I have tried to acknowledge in the text all those who provided source material and shared their expertise, there are a number of individuals who deserve special recognition:

  • The eagle-eyed, razor-sharp John Wagstaff, my friend and head librarian of the Music Faculty, Oxford University, who led me out of the darkness;
  • the patient, understanding Dr Peter Franklin, without whose help the pages that follow would not have been written;
  • Professor Brian Trowell for believing in me and the inspiration I derived from that;
  • Jeremy Montagu, for not believing in me and the inspiration I derived from that;
  • Dr Hélène La Rue, my academic supervisor;
  • Bruckner expert Dr Crawford Howie from Manchester University;
  • Fiona White, for whom the small fortune she received was meagre recompense for her word-processing skill and advice;
  • graphic-artist Nigel Pennington;
  • calligrapher David Cunningham;
  • Dr Joanna Archibald for her meticulous proof-reading;
  • Robert Parker, music librarian of the British Library, who sang to me in Czech over the telephone;
  • Berlioz specialist, Dr Hugh MacDonald;
  • Andrew Knowles of Alfred A. Kalmus/Universal Edition (UK) who moved mountains to procure unprocurable autograph scores and first edition publications;
  • Wolfgang Penzias and Anna Azmi of the Vienna Chamber of Commerce who ran interference for me whenever I came up against Austrian bureaucratic red tape;
  • Helmut Braunlich who untangled some of the knottier German text and provided translations;
  • William McElheny and librarian Clement Hellsburg of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra;
  • Rudolph Buchmeyer, librarian of the St Florian Stift;
  • Klaus and Elisabeth of Thomi-Berg Musik Verlag in Munich;
  • Dr Michael Struck, Head of the Brahms Institute at Kiel University, for his time, patience, expertise and lunch;
  • the librarians and staff of the National Library and Gesellschaft Library in Vienna (especially Frauen Liess and Hrdlika);
  • Director Marketta Hallová of the Prague Dvořák Museum and her assistant 'Mrs E', so dubbed because her surname is unpronounceable even to her Czech colleagues;
  • Zuzana Petrášková, Music Librarian of the Czech National Library;
    the British Academy of the Humanities, Linacre College and the Music Faculty for their generous financial assistance;
  • Edward Solomon, Webmaster of the British Trombone Society, for his constant encouragement and expertise, proofreading the French and German language extracts, consultative advice and inspiration for the title and ultimately publishing the current work on the Internet;
  • and above all my parents for their unstinting support and who still cannot get over the fact that someone could write an entire thesis just about the trombone.

Foreword

Maybe it's all those mind-boggling measures-rest we get, I don't know, but something seems to compel us trombonists, the so-called cerebral members of the brass section, to ponder and seek out "deeper meanings" beyond the printed part. Like most of those who I imagine (and hope!) will purchase this book, I consider myself a performer more so than a musicologist (that means you can trust me, right?), and like most of you, I imagine, my knowledge of the trombone's orchestral history, prior to undertaking this study, consisted of a hodge-podge of "facts" pronounced by the icons of the trombone world: grand old scholars (especially those with English accents), big-time players from big-time orchestras and of course authors of articles in the Journal of the International Trombone Association. (Hey man, if it's in the ITA Journal its gotta be true, right?) Along my journey to a better understanding of the orchestral trombone, I started to come across things that seemed to cast doubt on what the experts had declared. Initially, desperate to cling on to my anchor, I tried hard to reconcile incontrovertible positions so that my experts could still be right, and everything could remain hunky-dory. My inability to do so led me to realise that much that I had taken as gospel, especially about the orchestral alto trombone, was about as ungospelish and you could get.

The findings of this research are not exhaustive, but rather the first, timid steps towards the de-gospelisation of some of our most cherished folklore, and it is my hope that it will encourage others to delve further. I fully realise that I have set myself up to be knocked down by those that follow. (And right now I can already envision three or four reviewers eyeing up my text, with pupils dilated, hands gleefully rubbed together, and salivary glands kicked into over-drive, all the time thinking LUNCH!). However, if this should aid in a better understanding of our beloved instrument, than I shall welcome it. Besides, they will have to buy the book first.

Ken Shifrin
Oxford, England
May 2000

Preface

For today's orchestral trombone player, great difficulty often exists in determining when the alto trombone is the 'right' instrument for the first part, particularly in the works of Bruckner, Brahms and Dvořák. Scholarly editions and modern publications are often misleading; today's experts are frequently inconsistent, contradictory and highly subjective. To a certain degree this may be attributable to ambiguity on the part of music authorities contemporaneous with these composers, perhaps owing to the fact that the second half of the nineteenth century was a period of great flux, with divergent performance practices often dependent on geography. Ascertaining whether the composer meant the light-timbred alto or the heavier, more robust tenor to lead the section is crucially relevant to performances today, since the choice will influence the sound and style not only of the trombone group, but also that of the entire brass section which, with its powerful voice, can affect the colour of the orchestra. By examining the orchestral repertoire from Beethoven until the end of the nineteenth century I hope to dispel some of the ambiguity.

In Chapter 1 I will examine several works by Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Schumann in order to illustrate the development of orchestral alto trombone writing and the contributions each composer made to it. Except for the extreme demands Beethoven often made on the alto trombone's upper register, his scoring for the trombone section was unremarkable, primarily reserved for adding weight to orchestral fortissimos. Weber used the trombones somewhat more imaginatively, occasionally featuring them in pianissimo chordal passages; while Schubert took the development of the section a major step further by assigning it thematic material in both forte and piano unisons. With the exception of the latter's masses, neither composer posed serious tessitura challenges for the alto trombonist, rarely writing above a', whereas Mendelssohn and Schumann featured the instrument's uppermost register in prominent passages.

Berlioz is the focal point of Chapter 2, in much the same way he was central to sweeping changes which affected trombone writing during the nineteenth century in France: the ascension of the tenor trombone and the utilisation of valved instruments, along with the concomitant alterations taking place in orchestral harmonies and tone colour.

By around 1840 the tenor trombone had rendered the alto nearly obsolete in France, with England and Italy following suit. Even first trombone parts that had been originally intended for the alto were now played on the tenor – often a valved tenor – or, if too high, by a flugelhorn or trumpet. Moreover, as tenor trombonists developed greater facility in the higher tessitura, the alto was increasingly dismissed as an outmoded upper-register tool.

Discussed in Part I are the concepts of trombone range, nomenclature, clefs, score and part-writing, and the significance of primary sources such as the erste Abschriftstimme, or first handwritten part – the tools which I will use in Part II to determine the type of trombone intended for the first desk of the section by Bruckner, Brahms and Dvořák, who composed during the last stages of the transition from alto to tenor, when the standard orchestral trombone section was becoming firmly established as two tenors and a bass, and the goal of good 'section blend' coming to mean the production of well-matched, weighty sounds, replacing the earlier concept of a balanced mix of three distinct tone colours. Although during the early part of the twentieth century a few composers, notably Schoenberg and Berg, specified the alto trombone in some works, it was used more as an upper-register aid than for its unique tone colour.

To attempt to discern a composer's intention with respect to the use of the alto or tenor trombone from the context of even the autograph score can be highly unreliable. I intend to examine this issue on the basis of historical context and function, contemporaneous instrumentation texts and most importantly, when available, the first handwritten part – frequently the earliest and most specific indicator of a composer's requirements. Because the alto joined the orchestra on the backs of the tenor and bass trombone, composers prior to Wagner did not so much choose between the alto and tenor for the sake of tone colour, but were stuck with the ATB combination. Similarly, during the nineteenth century, French composers who scored for a tenor-led trombone section (the sound and power of which had so impressed Wagner) were obliged to write in this manner due to the acute shortage of alto trombonists in Paris.

The instrumentation texts by the following nineteenth century authorities are pivotal to my thesis. Not only do they chronicle the then current orchestral alto trombone-writing practices, but they provide us with a clear insight into what was considered suitable writing for the trombone, given the capabilities of the performers at the time.

  • Berlioz: Grand Traité d'Instrumentation et d'Orchestration;
  • Bussler: Instrumentation und Orchestersatz;
  • Corder: The Orchestra and How to write for It;
  • Dieppo: Méthode Complète pour le Trombone;
  • Gevaert: Nouveau Traité d'Instrumentation, Traité Général d'Instrumentation, Cours Méthodique d'Orchestration;
  • Jadassohn: Musikalischen Kompositionslehre;
  • Kastner: Traité Général d'Instrumentation (first and second editions), Méthode Elémentaire pour le Trombone;
  • Lobe: Lehrbuch der musikalischen Composition, Lehrbuch der musikalischen Composition, ed. Kretzmar;
  • Marx: Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, Allgemeine Musiklehre;
  • Sundelin: Die Instrumentierung.

Of far less use for the purposes of this study was the present-day literature on the orchestral trombone. Although there are a number of studies dealing with the eighteenth- century alto trombone as a solo and obbligato instrument, very little has been written about its orchestral role and none, of which I am aware, that deals specifically with the topic of examining the first trombone part from the standpoint of determining whether a composer intended the alto or tenor instrument. Mark Hartman's DMA dissertation, The Use of the Alto Trombone in Symphonic and Operatic Literature (Arizona State University, 1985), surveys of that which is popularly assumed to be the most significant liturgical, operatic and symphonic repertoire for the alto trombone from the eighteenth through to the twentieth century. According to the bibliographical sources, the only other thesis that deals with the orchestral alto trombone is David Mathie's 1993 DMA dissertation, The Alto Trombone: Current Use and Performance Trends (University of Georgia), which includes the responses to a questionnaire about the alto trombone submitted to all professional tenor trombonists and University/Conservatoire trombone instructors in the USA. The respondents were asked to state whether they played the alto trombone and to indicate in which orchestral works, to identify their preferred make and model of alto trombone and to recommend alto trombone method books. The survey is most revealing in the near-unanimous agreement of the players regarding works assumed originally to have been written for a first tenor trombone (for which the alto was therefore deemed inappropriate). I will show in my thesis that it was in fact the alto instrument that had actually been intended by the composer.

Robin Gregory's The Trombone (Oxford University Press, 1973) can be very useful as background material, provided one does not accept all his statements uncritically. The difficulty lies in separating insights from inaccuracies. Unfortunately, his discussion of the orchestral alto trombone contains several errors with regard to range, Gluck, Thomas and Bruckner, errors that have been further propagated by others.

As noted in the Coda section of my thesis, during the late 1960s there was a resurgence of interest in the alto trombone as a concertante instrument, spawned by new discoveries of eighteenth-century manuscripts from the Austrian empire (for which we are particularly indebted to Richard Raum and Kenneth Hanlon) as well as by the soloistic use of the alto by contemporary composers such as Britten. The alto trombone increasingly has begun to reappear in the symphony orchestra as players endeavour to ascertain which works require the instrument.

In contrast to the ophicleide or serpent, the alto trombone stands alone as the only instrument to return to the orchestral mainstream after having virtually disappeared. In this thesis I intend to consider the physical structure of today's instrument, as well as performers' attitudes towards it, as keys to assessing the extent to which the alto trombone has really been resurrected, and to what degree its traditional usage changed in order to bring about this re-birth.

Part I ››

Contents

 

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